Photo Exhibition Concrete Human

Three people behind a window. Two adults, a child with curly hair. The room behind them is dark, curtains frame the image. They’re looking out. That’s the opening photograph of the exhibition Concrete Human. 36 photographs, 22 poems. People in spaces that aren’t good for them. The images show nothing spectacular, just what we overlook every day.

You enter a room and your nervous system has already assessed it before you notice the ceiling. Light, air, material, sound. Hundreds of inputs, processed in milliseconds. The result is a state, not an opinion. Either your body relaxes, or it ramps up. Everyone knows this.

The science has existed for decades. Office workers with windows sleep 46 minutes longer than those without. Violent crime drops 52 percent in residential buildings with vegetation. Around 100,000 Europeans died in 2012 from indoor air pollution. The data is there, but the building industry keeps building the same way.

This is where reports fail. You can read a study and nod. But you don’t feel anything. Reports inform, they don’t confront. So: an exhibition.

Through a house project, I met an architect. Through him, an idea developed that grew beyond the original occasion. He met Norwegian photographer André Clemetsen at an architecture conference in Oslo. André wanted to photograph people in poorly designed urban spaces. Make visible what buildings do to people. We said: let’s do it.

That became 36 photographs and 22 poems. The first physical exhibition is Oslo, May 2026.

Before that came the question: how do you show large-format photography online? Images that really need to hang on a wall to work. I wanted to figure that out myself. So I built the online exhibition. 22 rooms, fullscreen, cinema mode. At the start, a breathing overlay: Sit comfortably. Breathe slowly. Let the images come to you. The images come to the viewer, not the other way around. No scrolling, no clicking, no museum interface. A format I had never built before. It was fun.

Photography that shows spaces is never neutral. What André does is artistically intentional. He captures mood, he stages it. Dorothea Lange did this with poverty in the 1930s. Walker Evans too. Great photography doesn’t show what is, but what you would otherwise overlook.

The subject found me through a different path. I built houses, furnished offices, made every mistake along the way. Bought expensive furniture because I thought that was the answer. It was never the answer. Atmosphere is what matters. You walk into a room and want to be there. You walk into another and have one thought only: get out. At some point I started to understand this. Not as an architect, but as someone who lives in these spaces.

Alongside that, decades of engagement with consciousness. Sri Aurobindo, “The Adventure of Consciousness.” Consciousness happens inside. A stable inner state makes the outside world less important. But the state is not invulnerable. A room can strengthen it or weaken it, can work with you or against you. Most of the time you don’t notice what’s happening.

My role in the project is concept and strategy, and translating the science. I build the bridge between what research knows and what visitors should feel. Heavy. Affected. Inspired. Motivated. First the weight, then the possibility.

Through the project we met Daiana Zamler, who is working on her PhD in architectural psychology, and Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s former climate minister. Different people, same unease: we know what spaces do to people and still build as if we didn’t.

90 percent of our lives we spend inside buildings. The building industry thinks in square meters and returns. The person inside is a usage assumption in a spreadsheet.

Concrete Human is a visual confrontation. The hope is that someone stands in front of one of these images, feels the pressure that the space exerts on the person in it, and starts seeing their own four walls differently.